


Chickens on the Roof

by oystergrrl



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bisexual Steve Rogers, F/M, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 17:46:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2741438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oystergrrl/pseuds/oystergrrl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers has been in love with one person in his life - or so he thinks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chickens on the Roof

**Author's Note:**

> I was inspired to write this by several fics I read that downplayed Peggy's relationship with Steve, which made me grumpy, because as much as I love Steve and Bucky together, I love Steve and Peggy together, too. Also, I am still bitter that we never got to see their actual reunion in canon. 
> 
> There are a few (intentional) deviations from canon here. I don't think they make enough of a difference to merit an AU tag, but, you know, a heads-up never hurts.

They look for months.

SHIELD is in disarray, with Fury and Hill (backed by Stark Industries) scrambling to regroup, so they don’t get much help from that quarter, but Natasha seems able to conjure intel out of thin air. She goes along with Steve and Sam when she can in between Senate hearings and press conferences, even brings Clint with her once or twice. Together, they track down the HYDRA bases in the deepest of deep cover around the globe - Honduras, Ukraine, Afghanistan, and on and on. And everywhere they go, they find the same thing.

Each cell has been taken down to scorched earth. No survivors. Maximum destruction for minimum effort, brutal in its efficiency, and the Winter Soldier long gone. Steve tries to find signs of Bucky in the method, but he can’t.

When Sam comes to Steve and carefully suggests that it’s time to head home, he doesn’t even have to push that hard. Steve hasn’t given up on Bucky – he’ll never give up on Bucky – but he’s able to admit to himself that this strategy isn’t working. They’re searching for someone who clearly doesn’t want to be found, and who, more than anybody else in the world, has the ability to stay lost.

Natasha was right. The Winter Soldier is a ghost.

************

Steve likes to think he’s gotten to know DC pretty well in the years since he woke up. He’d always wanted to go as a kid, but of course, there was never any money, and he’d come through on his war bonds tour, but he hadn’t really had a chance to look around.

So since he moved to the capital after the Battle of New York, he has taken the time to explore every corner of the Mall. He’s made a point to visit each museum, memorial, and statue, some multiple times, and he’s fairly certain that at this point, if the whole super soldier thing doesn’t work out, he could have a second career as a tour guide.

He loves all of it, but he does have his favorite spots, and one of them is the FDR Memorial. Some of it, he knows, is just plain nostalgia, memories of sitting next to the radio with Bucky listening to fireside chats, drawing or flipping through a magazine. But he also likes seeing the veterans of the war, his war, that come, often in wheelchairs or pulling oxygen tanks behind them, surrounded by family that extends to four generations. Occasionally, they’ll spot him, sitting there on his usual bench with a sketchpad in his hand, and give him a small nod or salute. Nothing extravagant – just a bit of acknowledgment from one soldier to another. They’re some of the only times Steve doesn’t feel wildly out of place.

Plus, he likes [the dog](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fala_\(dog\)#mediaviewer/File:Washington_D.C._-_Franklin_Delano_Roosevelt_Memorial_0029.jpg).

One day, a week or so after he and Sam get back to DC, Steve finds himself there, doodling absently and feeling the warmth of the early autumn sun on his back. The white noise of tourists milling around is pleasantly mind-numbing, and the scene has taken on a nice, golden haziness when someone sits down on the other end of the bench.

Even before his brain really picks up on what is happening, the primal awareness of Steve’s body lights up with “threat” and “friend” at the same time, and his heart starts racing. Slowly, he turns his head, and sure enough, there, after all this time, is Bucky, staring straight ahead, close enough to touch, though Steve knows better than to try.

He looks, in the parlance of their own time, like a hobo. He’s wearing dirty jeans and an oversize sweatshirt with the hood pulled up. There are bags under his eyes, and it’s clearly been awhile since he was acquainted with a razor. His hands are jammed in the front pocket of his hoodie, and his posture looks careless, almost relaxed, but Steve knows that underneath, he is tense and alert.

Steve tries hard to think of something to say. Something smart, something helpful. Something that won’t scare Bucky off.

What he finally manages to come up with is, “Hey”.

“Hey,” Bucky replies, still not looking at Steve.

A few moments pass, and Bucky hasn’t run off or tried to stab him, so Steve tries again.

“Where ya been, Buck?”

“Aw, you know – here and there.”

His voice sounds uncertain, like he’s still not quite used to using it, but there’s just a glimmer of familiar swagger underneath. And it’s that glimmer that hits Steve in the solar plexus.

“Why’d you come back now?”

Bucky is silent for a minute, but then he says, “I’m remembering things.”

“What kinds of things?” Steve asks.

“Just pieces. Fragments. Not quite sure what to do with all of ‘em, honestly.”

He sits there, quiet again, as if he’s considering what else he wants to say. Except then, without another word, he stands up and walks away, melting instantly into the crowd, with only Steve’s profound sense of confusion left behind to prove he was there at all.

Things don’t seem so hazy and golden after that.

**********

Later that afternoon, still rattled, Steve goes to see Peggy.

He knows that to a certain extent, this makes him a glutton for punishment; as grateful as he is to be able to spend time with her, even on good days, it’s bittersweet, and he never knows when it’s going to be a good day. But he’s spent hours going around in circles with himself over whether he should have tried to follow Bucky or not, and he thinks the visit might help him to feel more at ease, connected to a world where things feel familiar and make sense, so he takes a chance.

He’s relieved to see her smile when he pokes his head through the door. A lucid day, then – one where she remembers.

“Hello, stranger,” she says.

He pulls a chair up next to the bed and sits down, reaching across the rail to take her hand.

“Hi, doll.”

“You haven’t come to see me for a while,” she says. There’s no accusation in her voice; it actually almost sounds like a question, as if she’s saying something that feels true, but she needs confirmation.

“I know,” he says. “I’m sorry. “

Peggy cocks her head, giving him a speculative look.

“Something’s wrong.”

“Yeah,” he breathes, in spite of himself.

“Tell me,” she says.

And he wants to - God, he wants too. Because at times like this, he can see her in there, the Peggy he knew before, with her sharp mind and even-keeled pragmatism, as well as her warmth. So often, she’d felt had to hide that last one in order to be taken seriously; she only showed it to the people that she really trusted. Steve had always been proud that he’d been counted among them.

And that’s why he can’t tell her. Because the reality is that she’s fragile, even moreso than when he’d first started coming to see her. The staff is more careful with her, now, more sensitive to what might get her agitated. Steve suspects they’ve limited her access to the news for this very reason, because if she had any inkling of what had happened to SHIELD, her heart would be absolutely broken. And he can’t bear to be the one to cause her pain, not if it’s in his power to spare her.

So he just squeezes her hand, and, as he so often does these days, keeps his thoughts to himself.

“You know,” she says finally, “I hear that the leaves have started falling, but I can’t see a thing from my window. I think it would be lovely to go downstairs and get a good look at them, don’t you?”

Steve calls a nurse, and together, they help Peggy into a wheelchair. He takes her downstairs to a visiting room with wide picture windows, and together, they watch the leaves. Steve can hear people moving around out in the hall, but otherwise, the two of them are alone, and in the quiet, Steve begins to feel a little of the peace he’d started off the day with settle over him.

For all her wit, Peggy’s always been one of the best people he knows at sitting with someone in comfortable silence.

************

Steve goes back to the bench the next day and waits for hours, but Bucky doesn’t show. The next day is the same.

But on the third day…

Steve realizes with a certain amount of alarm that on that first morning, Bucky had actually been going out of his way to make his presence known. Because his approach then had been stealthy, but this time, it’s like honest-to-God magic. Steve is actively watching for him, and Bucky still manages to just materialize next to him on the bench, like Frodo Baggins removing the One Ring (Steve had plowed through all the Lord of the Rings movies back-to-back a week or so before, eager to knock that item off his list - it had made for one long, weird night).

Steve has a feeling that it’s important for Bucky to make the first move here, and so, even though it requires drawing on reserves of willpower he didn’t know he had, he waits quietly as Bucky just sits and stares, like he had the first day, and then, out of nowhere, says, “There were chickens.”

It’s so random that, at first, Steve is sure he’s misheard.

“Um, sorry?”

“When we were growing up,“ Bucky says. “There were chickens. On the roof.”

And Steve just gapes at him for a second because he’s right – there were chickens on the roof. They belonged to Old Man Mackleroy, and the coops were probably illegal, but no one cared, because Mackleroy didn’t stint with the eggs, and there were many times when Steve, his mother, and the others in the building had gotten through the day on a plain omelette and nothing else. But why this, of all things, is what Bucky manages to dredge up, Steve can’t fathom.

“Yeah, there were,” he says finally.

Bucky turns to him. It’s the first time they’ve made eye contact since the helicarrier, and it hurts and thrills Steve at once.

“Why the fuck do I remember that? When I’m still sort of sketchy on how I got this?”

He waggles his left arm a little, not taking the hand out of his pocket.

“I don’t know, Buck.”

Bucky runs his right hand over his face.

“It’s so goddamn frustrating. Some things are so clear, and some feel like they’re just out of reach, and then it seems like there are things that are still just lost in the dark…”

He sighs and looks up.

“I don’t understand how things fit together. I don’t know what they mean. Or, I guess, I know some of it. Like reading a book with pages ripped out. I get the basic idea, but the details – “

He shakes his head.

“You remembered HYDRA,” Steve says quietly. “Well enough to take it out more or less single-handedly.”

Bucky sighs again.

“After… after the river, I wasn’t sure what else to do besides go to ground, you know, back to base. But once I got there…” He shakes his head again. “I didn’t know much, but I knew one thing for sure – I wasn’t going back in that chair. And I was going to find anyone who had a hand in putting me there in the first place and make them fucking pay.”

Steve feels like maybe he should be bothered by this, but he really, really isn’t.

“After I was done with everyone in DC, I took everything I could off the servers, anything I could find about other cells. And I went hunting. I didn’t have any real game plan, was barely functional for some of it. I just wanted to tear it all down. So I did.”

He stops, kicks at a twig with the toe of his boot.

“But, you know, that only gets you so far.”

“Where do you want to go next?” Steve says.

“I don’t know,” Bucky replies, and he sounds so tired. “I was kind of hoping you could help with that.”

Steve smiles, a small, hopeful smile.

“I’d be happy to try.”

**********

They go on like this for weeks, as the weather gets colder and the crowds get sparser. Steve waits, and every couple of days, Bucky appears, and they talk. There are a few times Steve can’t make it – he does have responsibilities, especially after being away so long – and at first he’s worried that Bucky will take off again in his absence, but every time he returns, Bucky eventually does, too.

Bucky shares the scraps of memory that have surfaced, and Steve fills in the space around them with his own remembrances, connecting the stories to each other, building a context. They talk about Brooklyn, about Steve getting sick and getting into fights and Bucky alternately taking care of him and swearing at him like a sailor for being an idiot. They talk about the war, though Steve isn’t much help on anything that happened between the time Bucky deployed and the night Steve came for the 107th. They talk about The Commandos. Once or twice, Steve even gets Bucky to smile.

Bucky never asks about the train. He never mentions what came after.

Eventually, Steve starts to worry about Bucky’s safety. Bucky is, of course, taking precautions – showing up at different times, approaching from different directions, surely armed to the teeth under his baggy clothes – and Steve has begun picking out different benches, close enough for Bucky to spot, but far enough away from their usual to deflect attention. But they’re still exposed, out in the open like this, and finally, it’s enough to make Steve take a gamble.

“Bucky,” he says one afternoon. “I think maybe it’s time to think about turning yourself in.”

Bucky’s entire body tenses up, but he doesn’t bolt, which Steve takes as a testament to the trust they’ve been building. It gives him strength to go forward.

“I mean, someone’s going to catch up to you eventually.”

Bucky raises an eyebrow at him and looks affronted.

“OK,” Steve says, trying not to roll his eyes. “Maybe not. But, I mean… aren’t you tired of running?”

When Bucky doesn’t respond right away, he adds, “Is there even anywhere left for you to run to?”

They sit in silence, watching a young family pass by, the parents smiling at a little girl in a comically puffy pink jacket as she skips ahead of them, screeching delightedly, and then Bucky says, “Yeah, OK.”

************

The meeting with Fury gets predictably loud.

“So, let me get this straight,” he bellows, stabbing the top of his desk with his index finger. “You’ve been having clandestine rendezvous with the goddamn ex-Soviet superassassin who tried to kill you, me, and Romanov, and succeeded in killing numerous others, and you’re only seeing fit to tell me about it now? Care to explain why it took you so long?”

“Well, mostly because I pictured it going something like this.”

“Are you hearing this?” Fury says to Hill, who is leaning against the wall with her arms crossed, looking inscrutable.

“Sir– “Natasha begins, but Fury immediately cuts her off.

“I don’t recall asking for your opinion on this matter, Agent Romanov. On top of which, I’d say your own dance card was pretty full at the moment, wouldn’t you?”

Natasha presses her lips together into a tight line.

“Whatever,” Fury says with a dismissive wave. “Where exactly is he now?”

“I’m going to need some assurances before I share that information,” says Steve.

Fury stares at him.

“I’m sorry, were you somehow under the impression that this was a negotiation? Our primary objective here is containing the threat posed by the _wanted war criminal_. I don’t see how that leaves much in the way of wiggle room.”

“That wanted war criminal is the one who pulled me out of the river that day. He’s not our enemy, and he doesn’t need containment. He needs help.”

“We’re not running a charity here, Rogers!”

“Bucky wasn’t himself when he did those things. He had no agency, so he can’t be held responsible for his actions.”

“How do you know he has agency now? He could be running a long game, he could have sleeper programming - there are a hundred ways he could still be dangerous.”

Steve shakes his head.

“He’s not coming in as long as he’s treated as a hostile.”

Fury sits back in his chair, narrowing his good eye.

“I’m coming dangerously close to thinking your judgment on this one has been compromised, Cap,” he says.

“It hasn’t,” Natasha says firmly. Steve’s not sure she entirely believes that, but he appreciates the gesture.

Fury tents his fingers, apparently deciding to go with a different tactic.

“We can bring him in without you, you know.”

Steve isn’t good at playing people - that’s Natasha’s department - but he knows something about putting on a performance. He hopes it serves him well here.

“You’re probably right” he says with a shrug. “But how much manpower will you have to expend to do it? How many agents do you stand to lose? Because it seems to me that there aren’t many of those to spare these days.”

The expression on Fury’s face is one that’s become familiar to Steve as of late. It’s the one people get when he’s done something that surprises or disappoints them - the “But you’re Captain America!” face. As if you get to be Captain America by not having a spine.

“It’s a simple cost-risk analysis,” Steve continues. “If I bring him in on our terms, he’s in, no muss, no fuss, and he’ll be secure if something does go wrong. On the other hand, one word from me, he’s in the wind, and you’ll have to unleash hell to get him back.”

Fury sits there fuming. Steve actually starts to feel a little sorry for him, so when he speaks again, his voice is less combative, more cajoling.

“I know you think I’m too close to this situation to see it clearly. But I wouldn’t put others in danger, even for Bucky. I know him better than I know anyone, and I know he’s not a lost cause. Trust me.”

Fury looks at Hill in exasperation, and they have some kind of unspoken exchange before Fury flicks a glance at Natasha, and Steve feels a surge of triumph. Because beyond needing moral support (which he had), he’d asked Natasha to come with him today for this very reason:  to be a symbol, a reminder – this is what happens when you don’t give up on someone. And apparently, it’s working, because Fury finally sighs and turns to Steve, looking defeated.

“Full medical and psychological evaluations, and he’s under 24-hour-surveillance until I’m confident he’s not going on any kill crazy rampages. Also, I want Stark to look at the arm.“

“Yes, sir,” Steve says and turns to go, relief coursing through him.

“And Rogers…”

Steve stops, throws a glance over his shoulder. Fury is looking at him pointedly.

“If this goes south, it’s your ass.”

Steve nods and goes quickly out the door, Natasha on his heels.

He’ll take what he can get.

************

As if all of this isn’t momentous enough, Bucky’s reappearance in his life is notable for another reason.

The day Steve had his first encounter with Bucky was also the last proper day he spent with Peggy.

He’d made sure to go by and check in on her a few times since that afternoon, even with everything that had been going on, but every time she had either been sleeping off her meds or she hadn’t recognized Steve at all. He’d thought it was bad when she kept seeing him for the first time over and over again, but it’s so much worse when she turns to him with a polite smile and asks, “I’m sorry, have we met?”

It hurts marginally less when Sharon tells him she’s not recognizing much of anyone. It turns out that when she’s not running covert ops on him, Steve actually likes Sharon a lot. He’s gotten to know her fairly well since he got back from searching for Bucky, and her friendship has helped to make the aftermath of these most recent visits more bearable.

One afternoon, she stops Steve on his way out of Peggy’s room.

“Her condition is getting worse,” she says quietly, the two of them standing in the hall. “The doctors say she probably doesn’t have much longer.”

Steve nods, looking over Sharon’s shoulder. It’s not as if he hadn’t already figured that out on his own, but it still tears at him to hear it spoken out loud like that.

“Steve, you’ve done her a world of good,” Sharon says. “I want you to know that.”

“Sharon-“ he begins, because he can’t handle hearing empty platitudes from her right now.

“No, I mean it,” she says. “She’s lived so much longer than everyone who was with her through the war, through SHIELD. She’s had us, of course, but it wasn’t the same. She put a good face on it, but I think she was really lonely. And then you came back. Seeing you, being with you… it reminded her of who she’d been, of what she’d managed to do. Of how she’d been loved. You made her really happy.”

Steve looks at the floor, tears stinging his eyes, and Sharon goes up on tiptoe, putting her arms around him. He returns her hug, thinking that these Carter women really are remarkable. Then he turns and walks down the hallway, desperate to get outside.

God, but he could use a drink.

******************

If he’s being completely honest, Steve would have to admit that he was kind of expecting to get a call about Bucky at 2 in the morning at some point. He still has to fight down a flash of panic when he hears Hill’s voice over the phone.

“Cap,” she’s saying briskly, “There’s been an episode at Barnes’s place. No casualties, but he made a lot of noise, and the neighbors were complaining. I have to pass this along to Fury, but I thought you might want a heads-up first.”

“Yes,” Steve says, bolting out of bed and trying to hold the phone to his ear and pull on a pair of jeans at the same time. “Yes, of course. I… thank you.”

“You have half an hour,” she says and hangs up.

Steve only has to jog down the block to get to Bucky’s. When Fury had said he wanted Bucky transferred from DC to New York, there was no question that Steve was coming, too. He already had a place in Brooklyn, from when he had been living there before the Battle of New York, and SHIELD had put Bucky up in a brownstone down the street, with Bucky on the top floor, and SHIELD agents in the two apartments downstairs (they’re not even really undercover – Bucky already knew he was being watched, so there was no point). When Steve arrives, one of the agents is in the stairwell, in street clothes, but with her sidearm drawn. Steve waves her off and slowly makes his way to the door of Bucky’s apartment.

The place is a wreck. The coffee table and couch have been turned over, and there are several holes at roughly fist-height in the walls. The TV screen is splintered with cracks, and the mirror that had been hanging over the fireplace has shattered all over the floor. Steve steps in carefully, but there’s only the sound of glass crunching under his feet.

“Bucky?” he calls.

There’s no answer, but Steve hears a small noise in the bedroom, so he moves that direction.

He pushes the door open gently. This room is in much better shape, but the lamp has been knocked off the bedside table and is casting shadows at crazy angles. Bucky is sitting on the floor against the wall, knees pulled up to his chest and hair covering his face. The window’s open, and the room is freezing, but he’s only wearing  a T-shirt and boxers.

Steve moves very slowly towards Bucky, closing the window as he goes. When he’s close, he slides down the wall and settles next to Bucky on the floor.

“So…want to talk about it?”

Bucky shrugs, his gaze locked on a spot on the floor between his feet.

“What happened?”

The clock on the wall is loud in the quiet room, and Steve loses count of the seconds it ticks off before Bucky answers.

“I couldn’t sleep, so I was watching TV,” he says finally. “I was flipping channels, and there was this thing on the news about Pakistan. They were in Karachi, and at one point, in the background, I could see this broken-down building where I had a mission. It was pretty standard – going in to take out some warlord and his entourage who were making themselves inconvenient. But when I was done, I noticed this one guy laying there, which was weird, because I wasn’t supposed to notice much of anything once the mission was complete. But he was so young – couldn’t have been more than 18 or 19, barely even able to grow a beard, and it just seemed… off to me, enough to make an impression. And that’s not the worst thing that happened, that… that I did, not even close, but sitting in there on the couch, all I could think about was this shithole halfway across the world that was on my TV, and this kid with his goddamn fuzzy chin, and it just started feeling bigger and bigger until –“

He uses his hands to mime an explosion before lapsing back into silence.

“Fury’s not going to be happy,” he says finally.

“No,” Steve says. “He’s not.”

As much as Steve hates to admit it, Bucky hasn’t done himself any favors when it comes to complying with Fury’s dictates. He’d worked with the psychiatrists and other assessing doctors enough for them to declare that he was sufficiently in control to keep any of the Winter Soldier’s homicidal urges in check (which, in fairness, seems to have been accurate), but by his own admission, he hadn’t been terribly cooperative with the therapists he’d been assigned to for ongoing treatment.

“I don’t need anyone explaining to me all the ways my head is fucked up, Steve,” he’d said. “I’m in there. I know what it’s like.”

Now, Bucky lifts his head, twitching his hair out of his face.

“What do you think he’s going to want to do with me?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says. “Probably move you to a more secure location.”

“You mean a cell,” Bucky says, his voice tight.

“Not necessarily,” Steve hedges, though he thinks that’s probably a good bet.

Bucky leans forward, examining the new scuffs on his metal fingers.

“Do you think Stark Tower might qualify as more secure?”

“Maybe,” says Steve. “Why?”

“Stark said something about me maybe moving into the Tower the last time I was there getting my arm looked at,” Bucky says, and Steve feels a trickle of irritation mingle with the concern. Because that is textbook Tony Stark. He’d been pestering Steve – the whole team, really – to move into the Tower for a while now, and Steve had been getting progressively less polite in his refusals. So, of course, if Tony thought Bucky could help him get his spoiled-brat way, he’d take advantage of it. It’s dirty pool, and Steve knows that Tony knows it, but that he’s probably justifying it by thinking it’s for some greater good, which is equal parts endearing and infuriating.

“He said you could come, too,” Bucky says, overly casual. “I know Manhattan’s not your favorite, but…”

As Bucky trails off, Steve permits himself a sigh. Because, dammit – he’s moving into Stark Tower.

*********

Steve hates living in Stark Tower.

Don’t get him wrong – it’s the most luxurious place he’s ever seen, let alone lived in. Steve and Bucky get a whole floor to themselves, with five bedrooms , an unbelievable home gym, and a huge den with leather recliners and a TV that takes up almost the whole wall, which Tony insists on calling “the media room”. There’s maid service, and the kitchen is always stocked with food. But it doesn’t feel like a home. Brooklyn had changed dramatically over the years, but the buildings were at least still made of wood and brick, things that felt familiar. Everything in the Tower is sleek and shiny and cold, and while JARVIS seems perfectly nice for a disembodied talking machine, Steve feels like he’s being watched all the time, and he doesn’t like it.

Bucky, however, is doing much better.

It’s not perfect. Bucky still gets far less sleep than he should, trying to stave off the nightmares that wake him up screaming, and sometimes, if he’s had a rough therapy session or just a bad day, he’ll disappear for hours at a time (Steve only feels a little bad checking in with JARVIS to make sure Bucky stays in the building – he always does). But he’s making significantly more progress with his new therapists (vetted by Sam), and, gradually, he starts to open up, to Steve, of course, but to the other Avengers as well. And, more than Steve ever could have hoped for, they welcome him into their odd little circle. Bruce begins working with him on meditation techniques, to help him settle and quiet his mind. Natasha cooks for him, something Steve probably wouldn’t have believed if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, but it turns out she makes a mean blini. Tony even gets Bucky cracking wise a few times, and that, out of all of it, is especially touching to Steve, because it is Tony who has more reason to be wary of Bucky than any of them.

(Tony never actually says a word about it, but Pepper does, in her sweet, matter-of-fact way.

“He had one really rough night of being angry, when he found out about his parents” she tells Steve. “But then he got past it. He decided Bucky was as much a victim as anyone else, that it was HYDRA that was responsible. I think it helped that he knew what Clint had been through.”)

One day, Steve is on the observation deck of the Tower’s state of the art, fully immersive combat simulator (because, really, why wouldn’t Tony have one of those?) watching Bucky work his way through a holographic robot army.

Clint stands next to him, arms crossed, watching Bucky appraisingly.

“Shit,” Clint says. “He’s good.”

And it’s high praise coming from Clint, but it’s still not quite right. Because Bucky isn’t good.

He’s amazing.

Even back when he was more or less himself, during the war, he’d been an excellent sniper, disciplined and exacting, and Steve had seen up close the tightly constrained power and tactical expertise of the Winter Soldier, but what he’s watching now isn’t either of those things. It’s like Bucky has something to prove, but instead of making him reckless, it’s giving him focus and drive. It’s giving him grace.

Sometimes, even with all of the positive developments - or maybe partly because of them, who knows - it all gets to be a bit much for Steve, which makes him feel guilty, because it’s not like he’s the one who’s working through seven decades of manipulation and brutality. Still, on days like that, more and more often, he finds himself wandering down to Bruce’s lab.

Like Bucky, and most of the team, really, Steve finds Bruce’s presence calming (an irony that is not lost on any of them, least of all Bruce himself). His gentle demeanor and sly sense of humor make him easy company, especially when Steve feels overwhelmed by just… everything.

One afternoon, when they’re hanging out, Bruce pulls up a song by one of his favorite bands, The Talking Heads.

“Sometimes,” Bruce says, “When things get well and truly weird around here, I put on this song to remind myself that it’s not just us – that things get weird for everybody, really.” He smiles. “It’s a good thing to remember, Cap.”

One line in particular stands out to Steve:

_And you may ask yourself, “Well… how did I get here?”_

It pops into his head frequently  in the following weeks.

*********

Out of everything his post-Winter Soldier life has to offer, one of the things that seems to mean the most to Bucky is his bedroom.

He keeps it immaculate for one thing, which is new; Bucky had always been kind of a slob, before. Also, every time he shuts the door, he does it with a certain reverence, as if doors were rare and precious things.

It makes sense to Steve, how the idea of having privacy and ownership of something is important to Bucky after not having it for so long, but it still strikes him as sweet and sad and generally devastating .

It’s also accompanied by the slightly more problematic quirk of Bucky squirreling any item he takes a shine to away in there, many of which actually belong to Steve (including, but not limited to, Steve’s laptop, various jackets and hoodies, and every jar of Nutella Steve buys, even the ones he thinks he’s hidden pretty well). It’s not that Steve really minds him doing this - it’s actually sort of comforting, reminding him of the days they were roommates before the war, when their meager possessions had pretty much all been considered community property - but he can’t ever bring himself to go into Bucky’s room without his permission; he feels like it would be a violation. So he frequently finds himself in situations like the one he’s in now, where he is having to hunt all over the Tower to find Bucky (who, for some indiscernible reason, can’t seem to keep his phone charged), because he’d really like to finish that book he was reading so he can thank the nice lady at the bookstore who’d recommended it to him (it’s called _The Art of Fielding_ , and it’s mostly about baseball, but also about _Moby-Dick_ , which Steve now feels like he really ought to read, too - hence, another trip to the bookstore).

Neither Clint nor Natasha have seen Bucky, so Steve finally just breaks down and asks JARVIS, who directs him to Tony’s lab. When he gets there, Steve knocks, but then lets himself in without waiting for acknowledgement, as has become his habit. He finds Bucky and Tony sitting close together, Bucky’s arm propped up on a small rolling table as Tony makes adjustments to it with a tiny screwdriver. And there really wouldn’t be anything all that strange about it except –

Bucky has his shirt off.

In the space of a moment, Steve realizes it’s the first time he’s seen Bucky shirtless since he came back, and he realizes why, and then he feels like an idiot. A clueless, heartless idiot. Because they’ve been living together for weeks now, and yeah, their new place is huge, so they’re not exactly stumbling over each other in the bathroom like they used to, but if Steve hadn’t seen Bucky with his shirt off, it’s because Bucky had wanted it that way, and he hadn’t even noticed. But now he notices, and now he understands, because now he can see what it means to Bucky to be the Winter Soldier.

There are scars across Bucky’s chest and ribs, most of them shallow, no worse than superficial at first glance, but if Bucky’s enhanced healing is anything like Steve’s, the fact that there are any marks left at all means that the wounds must have been deep and ugly. And then there’s the arm.

The skin along the seam where metal meets flesh is raised and gnarled, terrible to look at, but the thing that bothers Steve the most, that sits like lead in his chest, is the idea that it’s intentional. Bucky had been HYDRA’s prize specimen; if they had wanted to fix the scar, they would have. But they didn’t. It’s like a brand, a statement of who he’d belonged to, even more than the star on his shoulder.

Steve has a moment of wishing powerfully that he’d been there when Bucky had taken out all those bases.

Tony glances back and forth between the two of them, and a rare look of understanding crosses his face.

“What’s that?” he says, jumping up and cocking his head to the side like he’s listening to something. “Oh, right, it’s Pepper’s voice in my head saying I should be anywhere but here right now.”

And he strides out of the lab.

Bucky stares after him kind of desperately, then turns to Steve, clearing his throat.

“So… looks pretty rough, huh?”

Steve sits down on the stool Tony had just vacated.

“I’ve seen worse.”

Bucky gives a humorless chuckle.

“I think you need to start spending your time in some classier joints, pal.”

‘You know, you didn’t have to hide this from me.”

“Yeah, well,” Bucky says, “I had a feeling you’d get that hangdog look on your face that you had a minute ago. I know that you know I’m broken, but I don’t need to see it reflected back at me like that.”

Steve leans back, stung.

“You’re not broken, Bucky.”

Bucky sighs and looks away.

“You’re a rotten liar, Rogers.”

Steve’s at a loss. His first instinct is to put a hand on Bucky’s arm, squeeze his shoulder, something, but he hesitates. Because for all the progress he’s made, Bucky still doesn’t like to be touched. There are exceptions, such as times like this, when Tony is tinkering with the arm, or when he is sparring with Clint or Natasha, but usually, Bucky’s body goes rigid whenever anybody so much as brushes up against him in the hall, and on the few occasions when Steve has tried to reach out to comfort him, he’s actively flinched away.

It had never been that way, before. Bucky had always been slinging an arm around Steve’s shoulders, ruffling his hair, smacking him (gently) upside the head when he’d done something stupid. It had always been so easy between them, and Steve’s not sure he’s realized how damn much he’s missed it until just this moment. So he takes a risk.

He lifts a hand, moving intently but slowly enough that Bucky has a chance to catch sight of it in his peripheral vision, has time to move if he wants to. Instead, he goes completely, heartbreakingly still. Steve takes a deep breath and lays his hand right on top of that horrible scar, his thumb and index finger resting on Bucky’s warm skin, the other fingers on the slightly cooler metal. Bucky breathes in sharply, and Steve feels a slight trembling under his hand, but otherwise, neither of them move.

“Don’t ever be ashamed of this,” Steve says quietly. “You earned it. It shows you survived.”

Bucky reaches up to cover Steve’s hand with his own, and for a long time, he just holds on.

Bucky seems a little more at ease after that. HIs eyes don’t look so haunted, and he’s far less likely to shy away from physical contact. But Steve still doesn’t realize how deep the shift runs until one night when he is startled awake by Bucky climbing into bed with him.

“Hey,” Bucky murmurs.

“Hey,” Steve replies, his breath coming oddly short because like so many things with Bucky, the familiarity of this - from tiny beds in drafty Brooklyn apartments and freezing tents all across Europe - is both comforting and painful at once. “Trouble sleeping?”

Bucky nods. “S’this OK?”

“Yeah,” Steve says again. “Yeah, it’s fine.”

Bucky settles into the bed, curling against Steve’s back. Steve lays there, perfectly still in the darkness, but he doesn’t sleep for a long time, listening instead to Bucky’s breath becoming slow and peaceful.

***********

Peggy dies on a Tuesday, when the cherry blossoms are out.

Steve is sitting in another interminable meeting about the reorganization of SHIELD when his phone buzzes. He sees the call is from Sharon and lets it go to voicemail, making a mental note to call her when the meeting is over. But when the screen immediately lights up with her number again, he knows something is wrong.

He commandeers a vacant office for some privacy, closing the blinds and taking a deep breath before he calls Sharon back. Her voice is rough from crying, but she explains everything calmly.

“They found her this morning,” she says. ”They did their last set of rounds at midnight, and she went in her sleep sometime after that. They said it was peaceful, and that she wasn’t in any pain.”

Steve knows that they always say that, hopes that this time it’s true.

“We were hoping you’d give the eulogy,” Sharon continues

“Of course,” Steve says, without hesitation.

They talk a little longer about various arrangements, and Sharon tells him she’ll call him later with more details. After he’s hung up, Steve leans against the wall, letting his head fall backwards and closing his eyes. In the darkness, he sees a beautiful girl wearing red lipstick in a war zone.

************

It dawns on Steve, as he’s sitting with Sharon and the rest of Peggy’s family in the front pew of the church, that he really hasn’t been to that many funerals. There was his mother’s, of course, and a few people from the neighborhood while he was a kid, but most of the people he’d been really close to had died while he was in the ice. He’d lost people during the war, obviously, but there hadn’t been any funerals on the front. Not that those deaths had gone unnoticed, those dead not honored - not by a long shot - but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t like this.

It’s a private ceremony, for family and friends, with a public memorial to follow in a  few days, but there’s still a good crowd. The church is very traditional, with a high arched ceiling and grand organ in the front.The light shining through the stained glass throws colored patterns across the floor, cheerful, but somehow not out of place; Steve thinks Peggy would have liked it.

There’s a hymn, and the minister leads the congregation through a prayer and a scripture reading, and then it’s Steve’s turn to speak. Sharon gives him an encouraging little nudge, and he climbs the steps to stand at the podium. Spreading his notes out in front of him, he begins.

“I’m here today to say a few words about my dear friend, Peggy Carter.”

“I first met Peggy when I was in basic training,” he says, “Back when everybody but Dr. Erskine thought that alone would kill me. Peggy was there when I went from being a skinny, sickly kid from Brooklyn to being Captain America, from being weak to being strong. And it was Peggy more than anyone else who made me consider what it meant to have that strength."

“She was dedicated to the idea that each of us had a duty to make the world better. It’s a common sentiment, but with her enormous heart and determination, she achieved uncommon things, and her example challenged the people around her to do the same. Those of us who had the privilege to serve with her would have followed her into hell, and sometimes, it seemed like we did. But we believed - in the mission and in her. We trusted her vision."

“It was that vision that drove her to found SHIELD. As we all discovered recently, there were some who sought to undermine what she had worked so hard to achieve, and they nearly succeeded. But the ideal - Peggy’s ideal - is solid. There are still individuals, including, I hope, many in this room, who are willing to fight for a safer, kinder world. A just world. Peggy’s world.”

He looks out at the audience, taking in all the faces, the ones who were considered close enough to Peggy to be invited to this service. And as he stands there, Sharon’s words come back to him:

_She put a good face on it, but I think she was really lonely…_

None of these people knew Peggy, not like he did, and for a moment, he feels weak with missing her. He sets his notes to the side, wanting them to see who he saw.

“She loved vodka martinis and Cadbury Whole Nut bars. She was unfairly good at poker. She had a mean right hook and one of the greatest smiles ever.”

“We are all poorer for her loss.”

The room is completely silent. After a beat, Steve steps out from behind the podium and makes his way back down the stairs, but instead of returning to his seat, he walks down the church’s long aisle and pushes through the door into the bright spring day.

There are a few photographers outside the church, waiting around idly - they know the attendance at the public memorial is likely to be far more star-studded - and they perk up a bit when they see Steve, but his expression apparently has enough thunder in it that they keep their distance. The sun is unseasonably warm on Steve’s shoulders, so he shrugs out of his jacket and loosens his tie, and he walks.

He wanders around for what seems like - and probably is - hours. He doesn’t have any particular destination in mind; he just wants to move. Eventually, he ends up at the Mall, and as it often does, the hum of activity there soothes him. It’s still a young place compared to others he’s seen, but it was here when he came into the world - both times - and it will be here when he is gone for good. It will be somebody else’s home then, somebody else’s symbol.

That notion appeals to him, reminds him of a mindfulness exercise Bruce told him about. In it, Bruce said, you start off picturing a mountain, steadfast and unmoving. Then, you’re supposed to imagine the seasons coming to the mountain, one after another, rippling over the surface. The point is to ease anxiety by keeping the mind from getting bogged down in a particular moment, to serve as a reminder that ultimately, everything changes. At first, the idea had been lost on Steve, but he finds more and more that it’s a comfort, to think of change as a blessing rather than a burden.

He makes his way into the National Garden, ready for a rest and pleased to be surrounded by growing things. There’s a school group there, and he dodges the running, laughing students and their tired-looking teachers as he makes his way to a bench and sits down. It’s a pretty wooden thing, nicer than the ones near the FDR Memorial. He can’t help a slightly wry smile at the thought that he’s become such a connoisseur of the DC area’s public seating options.

As if on cue, Bucky appears and drops down beside him.

Steve isn’t startled this time. He’d told Bucky about the funeral. He’d even gone so far as to ask if Bucky wanted to come, too, but Bucky had just shook his head and muttered something about crowds, which hadn’t sounded like a particularly compelling argument, even to Steve, but he wasn’t going to push. He’d just reconciled himself to coming on his own. Even so, it now seems totally natural for Bucky to be here.

He has no idea when Bucky got to DC or how he’d tracked Steve down (though it couldn’t have been that hard, because hello, Winter Soldier). What he does know is that while Bucky isn’t officially confined to the Tower, it’s been considered good form to let SHIELD higher-ups know if he is leaving, which Steve is 99% sure Bucky didn’t do, so that’s going to take some explaining. Plus, there’s the issue of transportation, which he probably conveniently “borrowed”, and that’s a whole other level of trouble they’re going to have to talk themselves out of, but Steve just can’t bring himself to care. Because while he’s not really surprised, he’s so goddamn happy that Bucky’s here he hardly knows what to do.

It’s not the old Bucky who’s sitting there. He’ll never be that man again; Steve knows that. But he still looks more like himself than he did when he first sought Steve out, fresh off his tour of HYDRA vengeance. He looks like someone who actually has a self.

He’s wearing a sharp leather jacket, for one thing - something he’d picked out himself, not a hand-me-down of Steve’s. When he’d first come in, Bucky had unquestioningly put on anything that had been handed to him, but lately he’d been taking more of an interest in his wardrobe. It’s hardly surprising, considering what a clotheshorse he’d been in his youth, limited funds permitting, but Steve still takes it as a good sign. And while his hair is pulled back in a messy ponytail, he’s clean-shaven, and his eyes are clear.

There’s an almost tangible energy humming under his skin, despite his stillness. Steve has gotten used to this odd combination, with it’s suggestion that Bucky is never really settled, even when he seems to be at rest. Sometimes is makes him worry, but right now, he’s just incredibly glad that they’re here together, alive and kicking, for better or worse.

“She was good people,” says Bucky.

“Yeah,” says Steve.

They sit there until the sun goes down.

******

The weeks after Peggy’s funeral are rough.

There are stories about her, in newspapers and on TV and the Internet, and almost all of them mention Steve, often including a photograph or, worse, a video. He knows giving the eulogy probably didn’t help matters, but it still irks him. He’s just a footnote in her life. He doesn’t like it that her accomplishments get overshadowed by her association with him.

He feels on edge, uncomfortable in his skin, and it makes him snappish. (There are a few awkward conversations where he tries to apologize for his rudeness and people seem to have no idea what he’s talking about - standards for civility in the future really are shockingly low.) Over time, he notices that people are treading lightly around him; Bruce and Natasha, in particular, are being especially gentle with him, but even Tony is only mouthing off at about half-strength. It makes him grateful and irritable at once.

One day, he is gathering his things to send out to the cleaners, and he grabs the suit jacket he wore to the funeral off the back of the chair in his bedroom where he had tossed it the night he got home, too tired to take care of it properly. Sitting down on the bed, he reaches into the jacket’s pocket and pulls out his compass. For a while, he just holds it, letting the metal warm in his hand, but eventually, he flips the catch. Peggy looks back at him, as poised and lovely as always. His breath hitches, and he wonders if it’s just going to be like that all the time now. If that pain is just always going to be that close to the surface.

He puts the jacket with the other clothes that are going out and carries the compass into the living room. The mantle in there is covered with photographs of Steve and Bucky’s families and the Commandos (all reproductions that they had ordered copies of from archives and museums when they had decided their place needed a personal touch- as grateful as Steve is, it still kind of floors him that the twists his life has taken mean that strangers took an interest in random things that were cleared out of his apartment after his “death”).

He nudges a couple of frames apart so there’s an empty spot, then he tucks the open compass into it, coiling the chain neatly behind. He takes a step back and gives a satisfied nod. It looks good there, he thinks. Peggy fits in nicely.

Bucky’s voice drifts in from the kitchen.

“Hey, Steve, have you seen the-“ He comes through the door and cuts off when he sees Steve standing there. “Oh.”

“Whatcha need, Buck?” Steve says.

“I was, uh, looking for the iPad stand,” Bucky says, glancing at the photos and scratching the back of his neck. “Have you seen it?”

“Yeah, it’s in my room,” Steve says, stepping towards the hall. “I was using it to watch a movie. Come on, I’ll get it.”

“OK,” Bucky says and follows Steve, and if Steve notices his eyes lingering on the mantle, he doesn’t dwell on it.

It’s not long after that that Bucky starts getting evasive and withdrawn. But not, it seems, from everybody – just from Steve.

It’s nothing all that overt, at least in the beginning. Mostly, Steve just notices that whenever he enters a room, Bucky seems to exit it a few minutes later. Then, Bucky seems to start picking up on his routines and making himself scarce when he knows Steve is going to be around. Steve starts getting used to hearing things like, “Oh, Bucky was here a minute ago” and “Hey, you just missed Mr. Roboto.”

He stops coming to Steve’s room to sleep.

It’s not that he disappears entirely; Steve sees him all the time at a distance, talking with one of the others, or training, or watching TV (it’s something of a banner day when Clint introduces him to _Cop Dogs_ ). He’s just always right out of Steve’s reach.

Also, somewhere in the middle of all this, Thor shows up. And wow - Bucky loves Thor.

It’s a lot like _Cop Dogs_ , only moreso - Bucky seems to find Thor endlessly entertaining. It gets to the point where whenever Steve happens upon Thor, Bucky is usually somewhere in the vicinity. A lot of the time, he doesn’t even seem to be all that invested in what’s going on, until Thor says or does something charmingly Thor-like (such as interrupting one of Tony’s endless attempts to impress him with Midgardian science by saying, “Truly a valiant effort, my friend” and patting Tony on the head), and then his face creases with amusement.

“I think Thor reminds him of you,” Natasha observes one day, after she has sidled up to the spot where Steve has been trying, and apparently failing, to watch Bucky unobtrusively. She leans into his side while, in the middle of the room, Thor and Clint spar, which would be no contest at all, except for the fact that Clint is fighting dirty which so offends Thor that he ends up devoting less energy to the fight than he does to a running commentary on how Clint should be ashamed of himself because such behavior is beneath him. Bruce and Bucky are standing together on the other side of the room, cheering occasionally, or piping up to heap more abuse on Clint, and Bucky is smiling.

What Steve takes away from that little interlude, which may or may not have been what Natasha was actually getting at, is that Thor reminds Bucky of Steve from before. Before all the death and resurrection, when there weren’t barriers and expectations and weirdness. When they could look at each other without things feeling so difficult.

Thor just seems so _jolly_. Most days, Steve feels like he’ll never be jolly again.

Kind friends or no, Steve is more than a little sick of himself, so in the interest of shaking things up, he calls Sam and invites him to come to New York for a visit.

It becomes very clear very quickly that Sam does not share Steve’s discomfort with Starkian excess. He arrives at the Tower in one of Tony’s limos, already buzzing on champagne and goofy with excitement. When Steve shows him into the apartment, he drops his bag on the floor, goes straight to the floor-to-ceiling windows, and soaks in the view, clearly thinking of his wings. Then he turns and surveys the room, which, despite Steve and Bucky’s attempts to make it feel homey and Pepper’s restraining hand, still has Tony’s flash written all over it. He grins at Steve.

“You’ve done alright for yourself, man.”

Steve shrugs.

“Yeah, it’s OK, I guess.”

Sam raises an eyebrow.

“It just feels a little… showy, is all.”

Sam shakes his head.

“Only you, Rogers,” he says, heading to the kitchen and pulling two beers out of the fridge like he’s the one who lives there. “So where’s your roomie?”

“Who knows?” Steve says with a sigh, accepting one of the bottles from Sam and twisting off the cap.

Instantly, Sam has his Listening Face on, the one that shows concern without coming across as condescending. Steve had seen a lot of that face when they were on the hunt, and its a relief to see it now, even though this was supposed to be a fun trip, not another opportunity for Sam to help tackle Steve’s problems.

But as they settle onto the barstools next to the kitchen counter and Sam knowingly says, “What’s up?”, Steve caves and tells him everything, what it’s been like losing Peggy and how it seems that now he’s losing Bucky again and just now knowing what he should do.

“I don’t understand,” Steve says when he comes to the end. “I don’t know what exactly I did that upset him, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

Sam just stares.

“What?” Steve says finally, starting to feel self-conscious.

“Come on, man,” Sam says. “Even you are not this dense.”

Steve scowls at him.

“Are you allowed to say things like that? I thought therapists were supposed to be nonjudgmental.”

“I’m not your therapist, I’m your friend,” Sam says. “Friends are allowed to judge the hell out of each other.”

“What exactly am I being so dense about anyway?” Steve says.

Sam sighs and leans against the counter on his elbows.

“Steve,” he says, as if he’s talking to a child. “What you are describing to me is not best friend behavior. It is jilted suitor behavior.”

Steve’s jaw drops.

“It’s… what?” he says.

“He feels _jilted_ ,” Sam says, enunciating the word dramatically. “Because of Peggy.”

Steve blinks.

“Peggy’s dead.”

“And yet,” Sam says. “I can see her right over there on the mantle.”

Steve shakes his head.

“You’re being ridiculous. And unfair. He’s been through so much - how can you think any of this boils down to him being jealous?”

“OK, a) you’re right – withdrawal is a common way that people respond to trauma, but I don’t think that’s what this is, especially since he’s not pulling away from the others the same way he is from you, and b) it’s probably not jealousy. It’s more like… conceding the field to a worthy opponent. And if he’s as intensely concerned with your well-being as you are with his, which strikes me as likely, he probably sees it as doing you a favor. You know, giving you the space you need to sort out your feelings without making you spell it out to him.”

“But we’re not… I mean, Bucky isn’t…that’s not how he feels about me.”

Sam picks up his beer again.

“You sure about that?”

Steve opens his mouth to say yes, of course he is… but then he stops. Because things are coming back to him now, from the time just before Bucky started pulling away, that are starting to take on a whole new significance.

The warmth of Bucky pressed against him as they both drifted off. The way Bucky’s eyes tracked him across a room. The small hopeful plans Bucky would share with him almost shyly, as if he still couldn’t quite believe he was allowed to have them.

And Steve waits for the weight of this realization hit him, to set him reeling with the shock of it and worrying about how it will change things, but then… that doesn’t happen. Instead he starts getting a familiar feeling - the kind he gets when he’s drawing and he realizes exactly what a promising work needs to make it complete.

Sam tilts his head, considering.

“Are you sure about you?” he says, his voice gentler.

Steve gets up and takes a lap around the kitchen island, unable to sit still any longer. His mind is racing; it’s almost like taking the serum again, his perspective shifting so quickly that the rest of him can’t keep up.

With a deep breath, he comes back to the counter, bracing his hands on the edge.

“What if I’m not… sure about me?” Steve says, and it must come out more challenging than he really intended, because Sam holds his hands up, placating.

“Hey,” he says. “Don’t forget who was with you in all those shitty motel rooms and abandoned buildings while you were out looking for him. I know you love the guy. It crossed my mind that it might not be entirely brotherly, but I figured it was none of my business unless you wanted me to know, and then you’d tell me. The point is, it doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters!”

“Does it? Steve, the only reason that he’s here – that both of you are here – and something approaching whole is because of the strength of your feelings for each other, whatever those are. That’s what’s important. It’s just, maybe it’s time to start working out some of those particulars.”

Steve sits back down and begins peeling bits of the label off his bottle. rolling the scraps into tiny balls.

“And if you’re worried about the physical part, well… sex is complicated, you know. It’s fluid. The things that people want can change. It happens all the time.” Steve raises a skeptical eyebrow. “No, seriously, man – _all the time_. It can be subtle or dramatic, but it happens. Just… don’t worry about what’s in the past or what other people think. Focus on what you want now.”

“I really don’t know what that is,” Steve says.

Sam holds up his bottle.

“‘Nother beer?” he suggests helpfully.

With a groan, Steve lets his head fall forward onto his folded hands, rolling it back and forth a bit in frustration.

“Sam?” he eventually says into the counter.

“Yeah?”

“Are you judging me right now?”

He feels Sam’s hand on his shoulder.

“Not at the moment, no. But I reserve the right to do so at a later date, depending on what your dumb ass comes up with next.”

“Fair enough,” Steve says.

******

The next morning, Steve gets up before anyone else is awake and takes his bike out. The streets are still dark as he winds his way past skyscrapers and storefronts. He heads north, not sure whether to head upstate or out towards Connecticut, just - much like he had the day of the funeral - needing to go somewhere.

As he gets away from the city, he gets off the highway, taking twisting backroads that are quiet in the early morning light. There’s a bit of a chill in the air, this early, and it’s bracing - it helps him think.  

Another line from Bruce’s song runs through his head:

_And you may say to yourself, “How do I work this?”_

One step at a time, that’s how. Like a tactical maneuver.

First of all, he has to acknowledge that while realizing that he has these kinds of feelings for Bucky - and vice versa - is new, that’s actually sort of par for the course these days. Everything between them is new. The stuff they’ve been through is pretty singular; it’s not like there’s a manual.

So where does he start? What can he build on?

There’s this: Peggy and Bucky have the claim to the greater part of his heart. Others had managed to find their way in, but not like those two.

Peggy had made him want to be a better man. Bucky had made him glad to be the man he was.

They were the two best feelings he’d ever had.

It was simpler with Peggy, of course. He’d known he was gone on her instantly, from the moment she’d punched Hodge in the face. He was hardly alone - everyone had been a little in love with her back then. Bucky, on the other hand…

He’d be lying if he said he’d never thought about Bucky that way, or that nobody had ever made assumptions about the two of them, but, well - Bucky liked girls. And Steve liked girls. And if he’d happened to notice how attractive Bucky was, with his broad shoulders and his long limbs and those heavy lidded eyes, it was because he was an artist and that’s what he was trained to do. Nothing more than professional interest. Except, well, maybe not really.

Memories come back to him, haphazard, fleeting - like chickens on the roof.

Bucky leaning down to help him up from yet another filthy alley floor. Bucky saluting him the night before he shipped out. The twist of Bucky’s mouth on the really bad days after Zola, when Steve was the only one who could make him laugh.

All of them give him a sense of warmth and rightness and mine, just like they always have. But for the first time, he begins to understand what that means, lets himself really pay attention the tinge of want running through everything else.

He’s just not quite sure what to do with it, is all. Sam had been pretty persuasive in his argument, but what if he was wrong? What if Bucky doesn’t feel the same way? Or what if he does, but he can’t handle it? He’d been so strong, coming back to himself the way he had, coming back to Steve. What if it’s too much to ask him to go one step further?

But if it’s not too much, Steve thinks, things between them could be good. They could be so, so good.

A thought pops in, unprompted: _What would Peggy do?_

And then…

_Peggy would be brave._

Steve lets out the throttle and heads home.

****************

When he gets back to the Tower, Bucky is sprawled on the couch in the media room watching _The Shawshank Redemption_.

He looks engrossed, despite having seen _Shawshank_ multiple times already (it seems to Steve that that movie is on some channel or other at any given moment of the day, which is kind of a feat, even for the 21st century), but when Steve comes in, he grabs the remote and turns the TV off.

“Hey,” he says. “I was just leaving.”

Steve sighs as Bucky hauls himself off of the couch.

“Were you now?“ he says.

“Yeah, I have a thing,” Bucky says. “With Natasha.”

Natasha, who had just been leaving through main door of the Tower as Steve had been coming in.

“I’d really like to talk to you,” Steve says.

“Sure,” Bucky says, sidling around towards the door like a spooked cat. “But later, OK?”

“Bucky-“

“Because I have to go now,” Bucky says. “For the thing.”

Steve is not proud of what happens next, but Bucky is almost out the door, again, and Steve is getting kind of desperate, so he resorts to extreme measures.

He breaks out the Captain America voice.

“Sit your ass down, soldier,” he snaps. “That’s an order.”

For a second, Bucky looks like he’s torn between bursting out laughing and breaking Steve’s nose, just to make a point, but eventually, he walks back to the couch and sits down, looking at Steve expectantly.

Steve grabs an ottoman and sits down across from Bucky, leaning forward, elbows on knees, and rubbing his hands together. Now that he’s here, he’s not entirely sure how to start. Finally, he takes a deep breath and just jumps in.

“How much do you know about me going into the ice?”

Bucky looks at him oddly, as if he’s trying to determine what the hell this conversation is even about.

“You had to put down a plane full of weapons before you got to any big population centers.”

Steve nods. “Yeah. And once I knew that I had to do it, once I started, Peggy was with me the entire time. She talked me through the whole thing.” Steve stops to take a breath; this is both harder than he’d thought and pretty much exactly what he’d expected.

“She didn’t have to do that,” he continues. “She knew how it was going to end; she could have walked away, to spare herself, but she didn’t. Her voice was the last thing I heard before I blacked out, and the first thing I thought of after I woke up.”

“And then I was in a strange place, and it was the future, and everything was awful. They spent days running tests on me, probably the same ones they ran on you. Then one night, Fury came into my room and handed me a stack of files. There was one on Howard, all of the Commandos. And Peggy.”

“I read them all. I saved Peggy’s for last, because I was steeling myself for her death certificate. But then, there wasn’t one; instead, there was an address for a nursing home in DC.”

“So you went to see her.”

“No,” Steve says.

“No?” Bucky says. “Why not?”

Steve sighs.

“Because I was being a rotten coward, that’s why. Everyone else I knew was dead, and Peggy was still here, but she had lived a whole life without me, you know? I thought she would be a totally different person, that seeing her would be like seeing a stranger, and I just… I  couldn’t do it."

“But after Loki and everything that happened here in the city… Well, my perspective on things changed. I didn’t want to run away anymore. So yeah, then I went to see her.”

Well,” Bucky says, “That must have been…”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “It was.”

_They’d told her he was coming. Said the shock of it might be too much for her otherwise. On the one hand, Steve was glad; he didn’t want to scare her. But he was also nervous, knowing she was expecting him. What would she think when she saw him? Would she be disappointed? He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants just before the elevator slid open on her floor._

_Then he walked slowly down the hallway and stopped in front of her open door._

_She was sitting up in bed, looking out the window and appearing perfectly composed, except where one hand was picking absentmindedly at the blanket in her lap. It was a tell that he recognized, one that was so familiar that Steve couldn’t breathe for a second, and he nearly ran back down the hall in a panic, but then one of the nurses was pulling him forward into the room._

_“Peggy,” she said gently. “Your visitor is here.”_

_Peggy had turned her face toward Steve then, and when their eyes met, Steve worried that his knees were going to give way._

_“Steve,” she said wistfully._

_“Hello, Peggy,” he said, totally unsure what to do with himself. The nurse, bless her, pulled a chair up next to the bed, and he sank into it._

_“I saw what happened in New York on TV, but it didn’t seem like it could really be you,” Peggy went on, her eyes welling up. “And now you’re here. You… you look just the same. “_

_Steve didn’t trust himself to talk, so he reached out and gently took her hand, feeling her soft, wrinkled skin against his, smooth and firm._

_“I got old without you,” she said, a tear sliding down her cheek._

_“You’re still the best-looking dame I’ve ever seen,” he said. It was supposed to come out light, bantering, but instead he just sounded wrecked and raw, and then he was crying, too. Leaning forward, he kissed her knuckles and then pressed them against his cheek, holding her hand there to ground him. He heard her breath catch in quiet sobs, and then her other hand came up to stroke his hair._

_Dimly, he realized that the staff who had been milling around out in the hall and doing a terrible job of hiding their curiosity had vanished. They knew that this was a private moment – just for him and Peggy._

“It got easier after that,” Steve continues. “For a while anyway. Her memory had started going even then, but she was alert a lot of the time. We were able to talk.”

“There was this one day where she wanted to go out to sit on the patio because the weather was nice. So we went, and the nurses brought us some lemonade. And we were just sitting there enjoying the sun, and she said, ‘Tell me something, Steve’” – Bucky’s mouth quirks up at Steve’s attempt to imitate her accent – “and I said, ‘All right’. And then she said, ‘You and Barnes – did you ever do the deed?’”

Bucky barks out a surprised laugh.

“She said that?”

“Yes. Yes, she did. “

“What did you do?”

“Well, first, I almost choked to death on my lemonade, and then I assured her that no, you and I had never, in fact, done the deed. And then I started feeling bad, and told her I hoped I hadn’t done anything to make her doubt how much I cared about her, and she cut me off and said, ‘Oh, darling, I know. We may have only kissed the once, but a girl can tell.’”

Bucky raises an eyebrow at the mention of the one kiss, but he doesn’t interrupt.

“Then,” Steve presses on. “She said, ‘You just seemed different when Barnes was around. Lighter. And everyone could see the way he looked at you.’”

Bucky’s smile fades, and his gaze drifts to the floor.

“I’m bringing this up because I think there’s been a misunderstanding.”

“Steve -“Bucky starts, but Steve just keeps talking, afraid that if he doesn’t, he’ll lose his nerve.

“I loved Peggy. A part of me will always love her. But, pal… you’ve got a hold on me like no one else does.”

“Stop,” Bucky says, closing his eyes. “Please, Steve. Just stop.”

Steve does, taken aback by the weariness in Bucky’s voice, and suddenly, he starts to worry that he’s made a terrible mistake.

They sit there in heavy silence for a moment. Then, as if he’s steeling himself for something, Bucky takes a deep breath and opens his eyes. When he looks at Steve, his expression is pained.

“You don’t owe me anything.”

Steve just stares at him.

“I… what?”

“I know we have a history and everything,” Bucky says. “But this? This is way beyond the call of duty. I don’t need you to saddle yourself with me out of some sense of obligation or… or pity.”

“Pity?” Steve says incredulously. “Buck… I went all over the world – literally, _the whole world_ – looking for you.  I sat on benches for hours a day, for weeks, on the off-chance that you’d show up. I am living under the same roof as Tony Stark. These are not actions that a person undertakes out of pity.”

“Nice job throwing Stark under the bus there.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything, but the set of his jaw speaks volumes. Steve remembers what a stubborn bastard he can be and decides he may need to finesse this a little.

“Look,” he says, lowering his voice. “I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you But I know what it was like for me. When I woke up, I was here, I was alive, but I was… empty. Hollow. I could feel what was missing more than what came back. And then I saw you. Since you’ve been here, I’ve started to feel complete again.”

Steve can see the struggle going on inside of Bucky clear as day on his face - his guilt and sense of unworthiness versus his desire for what’s Steve’s saying to be true. But slowly, a small, hopeful light kindles in his eyes.

“So, what – you’re trying to say you’re sweet on me or something?”

“Yes,” Steve says. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to say.”

“And when precisely did you figure this out?”

“Um, pretty much yesterday?”

Bucky laughs then, big and bright. It’s been ages since Steve heard him laugh like that, maybe even since before the war, and all he can think is thank you, thank you for letting me have this, thank you for him, thank you, thank you, thank you.

“God, it really is the blind leading the blind around here, isn’t it?” Bucky says finally, but his words don’t have the edge of bitterness that’s become so familiar.

“How long has it been for you?” Steve says.

Bucky’s eyes go soft at the corners.

“Awhile,” he says, reaching out with his flesh-and-blood hand to take Steve’s, twining their fingers together.

“How long?” Steve says.

“In a way, I think it’s always been there, ever since I first saved your ass because you didn’t have the good sense to stay down. But the first time I really felt it, you know, really recognized what it was, was when I shipped out. I know it’s a cliché - absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that -  but we’d never really been apart before, and I think that’s what it took to make me realize. Because I didn’t miss you like a buddy, Steve. I _ached_ for you.”

“God, Buck, why didn’t you say anything?”

“I was a mess. Granted, it seems like small potatoes compared to what came later, but, well, I wasn’t in a good way after what happened with Zola, and then there was Peggy, and you know, all of this” – he gestures vaguely at Steve’s body – “and  - it was just too much.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says. “I wish I’d known.”

Bucky shrugs.

“I didn’t want you to,” he says. “It was easier to flirt with whatever girls were around. I could do it on autopilot. I mostly did, there for a while. Had to keep up appearances.”

“Is that why you went off with that blonde that one time in Calais?”

Bucky’s smirk is somehow both guilty and smug.

“OK, maybe it was mostly for appearances.”

Steve shakes his head, feeling wistful and nostalgic and a little bashful about the question he wants to ask next.

“Did you have any experience, you know, with men? Before?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says after a pause. “A little. You?”

“No,” Steve says.“But based on what you’re doing to me just by touching my hand, I don’t think lack of interest is going to be a problem.”

There’s a flash of heat in Bucky’s eyes, and he leans forward ever so slightly, putting himself further into Steve’s personal space.

“Shit,” he breathes. “When did you get so good at flirting?”

Steve gives his fingers a squeeze, remembering a similar look on Peggy’s face once upon a time, when he stood in front of her with a broken transponder in his hand.

“When I found someone worth flirting with.”

Bucky taps their linked hands against his thigh, thoughtful.

“So, you’re sure about this? Really sure?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “I am.”

Bucky gives him one last conflicted look, and the next words come out as if he feels duty-bound to say them.

“I don’t deserve you.”

“What do any of us deserve, really ?”

Bucky huffs out a breath and reaches out to cup his left hand around the back of Steve’s neck, pulling him forward so their foreheads are touching.

“You’re really something else, you know that?”

“I’ve been told.”

And then Bucky is kissing him.

Even without much basis for comparison, Steve can tell it’s not a great kiss. It’s rough and sloppy and their teeth clack together, which he isn’t crazy about. But it doesn’t matter – it’s still pretty much the best thing that’s ever happened to him.

Eventually, Bucky mouths his way down Steve’s jaw, pressing his face into the crook of Steve’s neck.

“It feels like I’ve waited forever to do that,” Bucky says against his skin.

“Was it worth it?” Steve says quietly.

Bucky sits up and looks at him, reaching up to run metal fingers over Steve’s cheek, then down to catch Steve’s bottom lip with his thumb.

“Hell, yeah,” he says, and leans in .

This time, the kiss is _outstanding_.

*********

“Go ahead,” Steve says. “Say it.”

“Not necessary,” says Sam, leaning in to steal a piece of the avocado Steve is chopping. “The results speak for themselves.”

Steve quirks an eyebrow.

“Come on – I can tell it’s killing you.”

“Naw – that shit-eating grin on your face is acknowledgment enough.”

Said grin proceeds to get bigger.

“It’s a good look on you,” Sam says. “And, if we’re being honest, I very much prefer it to any intimate details you’d feel compelled to share about how all of this played out.”

“What happened to all your encouraging talk about ‘the physical part’?”

“I’m all for it in the abstract,” Sam says. “But I’d like to be able to look you in the face without picturing the super soldier sexcapades the two of you have gotten up to.”

“Sexcapades?” Steve says.

Sam assumes an earnest expression.

“It’s a technical term.”

“You know, I can hear you assholes,” Bucky calls from the living room. “And I don’t really appreciate these attacks on my virtue.”

“Aw, shut up, Barnes,” Sam shouts. “People pay good money for relationship advice these days, and I’m over here sorting out your sorry love lives for the low, low price of free. You ought to be falling all over yourself thanking me, you ingrate.”

“Fuck you, Wilson,” Bucky says after a beat, but there’s no real fire to it.  

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Sam replies, with equally half-hearted bravado, as Steve smiles and chops.

Later, Steve finds himself at the head of the table with Bucky and Sam on one side and Natasha and Clint on the other. They’re eating shrimp tacos and drinking beer, and Natasha is cracking Sam up with a story involving Clint, a tall tree, and an extremely angry possum (“Aw, possum, no,” she is saying, as Clint glowers at her). Looking around, Steve thinks that he honestly can’t remember the last time his heart felt so full.

He must have a truly soppy look on his face, because Bucky bumps their knees together under the table, then gives Steve a wink over a sip of beer. Steve picks up his taco and takes a bite, just to give himself something to do, because he sincerely thinks he might cry, and as much as he feels comfortable with everyone at the table, he doesn’t think that would strike the right note for the evening.

After dinner, Sam heads off somewhere with Clint and Natasha (“You think I want to hang out with you grandpas all the time? You cramp my style.”) while Steve and Bucky stay behind. It’s a punchline, really - the old guys calling it a night while the youngsters go out - but, well, as Thor’s friend Darcy would say, that’s Steve’s jam. Even before the military discipline and the squeaky clean public image, he was always an early-to-bed, early-to-rise kind of guy. Bucky knows that.

Bucky knows him.

For example, he knows that Steve takes a somewhat perverse pleasure in doing the dishes, so he helps carry everything to the kitchen, then sleeps out and leaves Steve to it. When Steve finally finishes and heads to the living room, Bucky is stretched out on the couch, reading a novel Natasha loaned him.

“How’s your book?” Steve says.

“’S good,” Bucky says. “This Blomqvist guy is kind of a chump, but Lisbeth is fucking awesome.“

Steve smiles, hearing Clint and Tony in his choice of words.

“Duly noted,” he says.

“You go on,” Bucky says. “I’ll be in there when I get to the end of this chapter.”

Steve nods and trails his fingers along Bucky’s arm – the left one – as he walks past. Bucky reaches up to catch his hand, giving it a quick squeeze and smiling at Steve before going back to reading. It’s a small thing, but it’s enough to put a lump in Steve’s throat. Again. He really is turning into a sap.

He really couldn’t care less.

He brushes his teeth, then changes into a pair of pajama pants and climbs into the bed. Where Bucky will be joining him. Not just to sleep. Because that’s something that they do now. Which might stop being strange and amazing some day, but not, Steve thinks, for a good long while.

On the dresser, his phone is mounted in the speaker dock that Tony gave him, playing another of Bruce’s winking nods to the absurdity of their day to day existence.

_Though nothing will drive them away_

_We can be heroes, just for one day_

_We can be us, just for one day_

“When the good happens for us, it’s so fleeting,” Bruce had said. “We have to grab it and run.“

Steve is running for all he’s worth.

****  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I feel like my musical choices are pretty obvious, but in case you're wondering, the Talking Heads song is "Once in a Lifetime", and the song at the end is "Heroes" by David Bowie. 
> 
> Bruce's mindfulness exercise is from the book The Mindfulness Solution by Ronald D. Siegel. 
> 
> I apologize for any glaring geographical errors. I've never actually been to DC, and while I have been to New York, I've only ever gotten around on foot or using the subway, not on a motorcycle ;).


End file.
